ALCOHOLISM HAD SNUCK up on me. Before I was twenty-four, I had drunk only once—that night I had the rum and Coke with Robert Workman. I didn’t have a single drink after that. I had no need for alcohol, not even to think about it. I had a great life. I married Christine three months after I got my BA. She was working as a nurse at St. Joseph’s on Lakeshore Drive. I had a fantastic relationship with my mom and dad and all four of my grandparents. Christine and I were planning a family whenever nature ordained it. We didn’t want to try to manipulate anything. We wanted to meet life as it arrived, no fears. We both loved Chicago and the lake front, the wonderful hotels, the Shedd Aquarium, the Adler Planitarium, the Museum of Science and Industry, the Buckingham Fountain, the shopping. We loved the Wild Cats and the Bulls and the Black Hawks, the Bears, Maxwell Street, Pizzeria Uno and Duo, and believe it or not, both the Cubs and the White Sox. We’d pull for each team in their respective league, except in later years when interleague began and when they played each other. It may became the best team win on any given day and because we loved both teams we couldn’t lose.
On my twenty-fourth birthday, Christine arranged a party for me—nothing fancy, just a get-together of my parents, her parents, both sets of my grandparents and about six of our mutual friends. Our modest three-story house in Bridgeport easily accommodated the total sixteen people that hung out in the house that night. We had my favorite then, black forest cake and chocolate milk. Of course, Christine knew what everyone she had invited liked to drink so there was every kind of beverage on the table from beer to wine, coffee to tea, lemonade to ice water, chocolate milk and apple juice, which was my second favorite drink at the time. It was the late sixties and my party was a lovefest of sorts with people who all got along well.
There were no political debates or silly arguments about meaningless things. There was just a bunch of giggles and talk about everybody’s favorite novel—To Kill a Mockingbird, Dr. Zhivago, Catch Twenty-two, of Mice and Men. Everybody was intelligent, kind, respectful of each other’s feelings. It was one of my best birthdays ever.
It was a Friday night. No one had to go to work the next day. No one had to rush out of there to get home to catch a good night of rest. The party was mellow and lingered till a bit past midnight when the first yawns occurred, and shortly thereafter the conversation shifted to dialogue as to whether it might be time for people to start leaving. It took about forty-five minutes till about 1:00 a.m. for everyone to say their good-byes and share hugs and kisses. My mom, dad, and grandparents were the last to leave, each of them lending a hand to help Christine and me clean the party mess.
I couldn’t help but reflect on what wonderful people they each were—my mom and dad, Kathy and Bob, and my maternal grandparents Phil and Lena, my paternal grandparents Sid and Dorothy. Several years before my twenty-fourth birthday party, my mom and dad decided to downsize now that their kids were grown and move out of the house from Wheeling to Glenview. They wanted to be closer to Lena and Phil, who had a slew of medical issues in their early seventies. They found a house one block from my parents’ house. Kathy could walk there, which she and Bob had done hundreds of times in the past four years. Bob and Kathy’s plan was to help out Lena and Phil as much as they could in order to keep Lena and Phil in their home as long as possible. My grandparents knew they weren’t healthy, and they knew the sands of time were slipping through their hourglass. They had sincerely expressed their disdain for ever living in a nursing home and my mom had figured that being close by to be able to help them if she or Bob were needed was a perfect solution.
My dad didn’t have any problem with Mom’s plan. After twenty-six years of being married to her, he was still deeply in love with her, more so now than ever before. They were utterly happy with their relationship and my dad went right along with the plan, not because he let my mom dictate the terms of big decisions, but he knew it was the right and really good thing to do. Besides, Bob’s mom and dad lived on Glencoe Beach, thirteen minutes away from their new little house in Glenview.
When they left my party that night, they stepped outside into a glorious winter scene. The sky was clear with a bright three-quarter moon shining. Though the temperature was only 28 degrees, there was no wind and a crispness was in the air that seemed to elevate all of our spirits more than the chill made my family feel they had to rush to the car.
Even though we had shared hugs and kisses inside, we shared more of them outside in the beauty of the night. I remember kissing my grandfather and my dad on the neck then blowing fart sounds with my lips on the same necks that I had just kissed. It tickled each man literally, made them giggle, and reminded them how they both used to do that to me when I was a little boy. I was sure that my grandfather had taught that playful gesture to my dad. What I wasn’t sure about was how many generations back that goofiness went.
I was so happy that night when they drove away. There was so much love for me packed inside that Lincoln Continental. I took Christine’s hand, pulled her close to me, and kissed her romantically before we walked back into the house, arm in arm to go to bed.
I was deep into a contented sleep when the phone rang about 4:45 a.m. It was pitch-black outside, clouds having come up and hidden the earlier bright moon. It was totally dark inside the bedroom. I hoped it was a rare wrong number because I wanted to return to my sleep as quickly as possible.
“Hello?” I said.
The series of statements I heard next were a blur of information then and are still a blur of information now. I was reduced to nearly childlike responses as the slew of the most horrific of phrases were revealed to me.
“Car crash on the outer drive. Caused by a drunk driver. Hit your parents’ car front left quarter panel causing it to flip at least four times.”
“What?”
“Your grandparents weren’t wearing seat belts in the backseat. Grandpa broke his neck.”
“Huh?”
“Grandma broke her back and spine.”
“Huh?”
“Flew around the inside of the car like rag dolls causing broken bones and head injuries to both of your parents.”
“What?”
“All killed.”
“What? No, no, no, no, no. There’s got to be a mistake.”
It was not a mistake. Through a fog of emotions, I had heard enough to know the facts as they truly were. Four of the people I loved most in the world had been senselessly snatched from me. I could see how it had unfolded. The four parents had decided to cap off the night with the scenic drive home along Lakeshore Drive, hoping to see the moon illuminate the frozen snow-covered lake. Although it was a much longer ride home, I could feel each of their longings for twenty minutes more of the beauty of nature as well as the splendid architecture of the buildings along the outer drive of Chicago’s Gold Coast.
I listened carefully as the voice on the other end of the line told me where my parents’ and grandparents’ bodies were, and before I felt anywhere near prepared for it, there was a click and the worst phone call of my life had terminated.
I sat there for a moment with the receiver in my right hand, wondering if I even had strength enough to put it back into its cradle. I contemplated waking Christine but when I looked to my left, I saw that she was already awake, sitting up against the headboard.
“What happened, honey?” she asked with eyes looking more concerned than I had ever seen them.
I can’t even write after, all these years, exactly how I explained it to her. The pain of repeating it in any form has never abated. I can tell you that when I was finished, tears were streaming down her pretty young face. No doubt she too had been hit with a cacophony of overwhelming feelings. They included complete compassion for each of my family members and how they had died. There was empathy for me and the fact that my monumental grief moment would change me and that I would have to live with it forever. And though she never told me this, there had to be her unbridled joy that it wasn’t her parents and grandparents who had also been at my party and who had also come in one car. She might have even been thinking, Thank God, there had been no drunk drivers out that night between Bridgeport and Oak Lawn.
That was the beginning of it—the unfathomable, unfillable, unrelenting, unending emotional and physical hole in my stomach. It’s been said before, by millions of people, I imagine, and scores of my own patients, I am certain, but when this kind of emotional pain strikes you, it is as if someone has aimed a shotgun at your stomach, point-blank, and pulled the trigger. You are blasted by numerous pellets, ripping a virtual hole in your stomach and all the other vital organs that surround the area. Time ceases to move. Then almost instantly, you contemplate what you have lost, how infinitely much you have lost. Then you are struck by an inability to breathe that is so all encompassing that you wonder if you will ever be able to take your next breath, then all the breaths you had previously been looking forward to breathe in joyfully before this moment. You go into near physical shock. You want someone you love to put you into a bed where you can lie in a fetal position so the stomach pain doesn’t hurt as much, cover you with a huge blanket, then wrap their arms around you tightly while saying in an ultra-soothing voice for weeks on end, “It will be okay, Turf, you’ll make it through this. I’m still here. I haven’t gone anywhere. I’m not going anywhere. I’ll be there with you through this whole thing.” I wanted Christine to do all those things for me. But all she initially did was hug me tightly as I fell to my back in our bed, my tears flowing profusely, before she pulled my head to her breasts and held me there for nearly a quarter of an hour while rubbing my head and remaining silent. I realized even then that she was giving me the best she had in that moment—tenderness that I longed for and didn’t think I could breathe without.
Slowly, I curled into a fetal position beside her, feeling less in control of myself than I ever had. And gradually, over the next several hours, days, months, and years, all the reassurances that I could ever yearn for from Christine that I would make it through this and be okay, that she was still there and wasn’t going anywhere, came as often and with as much fervor as a human being could deliver them.
The problem was that I didn’t believe any of it. I didn’t trust anything anymore. I didn’t trust Christine. I didn’t trust myself. How could I? I didn’t think I would ever leave my bedroom again, much less be able to leave my bed to go to the bathroom. I didn’t trust my priest to be able to tell me anything that would assuage my grief. I didn’t trust the morticians to restore the beauty to my parents’ and grandparents’ bodies and faces. Nothing. I trusted in and believed in nothing, including God—least of all God. I had always considered him a friend. But I thought now, How could he do this to me? I was contemplating from a place of raw emotion. There was no logic to any of my thoughts. I had been figuratively shot in my emotional stomach but felt unfathomable pain in my real stomach now. Where was God when I needed him? Where was he when my family with the sacred heart scapular hanging from the rearview mirror needed him a couple of hours ago? God was the one I trusted the least right now.
Not only had four intrinsic elements of my life been untimely and unfairly ripped from me, but there was no God comfort anywhere to be found or felt within me. He too had been ripped from me, ruthlessly.
As I have said and may repeat, there was no logic to my thinking, just pain. Some of the shotgun blasts had also hit my brain, releasing horrible chemicals I had studied for years in school. These chemicals, plus the pain I was feeling, had made me mentally ill. No matter what kind of young man I had been before, no matter who I was married to, no matter what funeral arrangements I would have to make or patients I would have to see, I was damaged goods.
For the next several months, I lived in a no-man’s-land, barely functional. I continued with my graduate studies in psychology while working part-time in the Chicago Public School System. Christine worked at St. Joe’s tirelessly and selflessly as she always did. But when the clock started ticking again it was in slow motion—click, click, click—one agonizing second at a time. You could almost hear the sound of some mystical time beating drum. Boom, boom, boom, one boom per second. The agonizingly slow annoying pace was palpable. Thud, thud, thud. Each thud a pang of pain. Pain, pain, pain. It was nearly all I could think of. Here I was, one of the luckiest men in the world because I was married to one of the kindest, most caring woman imaginable and I couldn’t even transfer my pain into loving her more deeply. Instead, those early months following the accident were the origins of my slowly developing neglect of her. We were newlyweds and it shouldn’t have been that way. Don’t get me wrong. I was crazy about my wife—I still am—we had good times, scores of them and thousands of laughs. so many raucous and hysterical laughs. But I should have been much more attentive to her needs, taken more time to explore her heart, mind, and soul. And it was only after many years of the raucous laughter that I began to question its origin.
I almost feel guilty now that this is my story and not Christine’s. She deserves her own memoir. She is a great lady and a better person than I will ever be.
About six months after the accident, I didn’t think I could go on. The hole was still there and time was still thudding its sluggish refrain. I tried to think of everything I loved, the Cubs and the White Sox for example. I went to games. It didn’t help. I ate out a lot. I took Christine countless times to Pizzeria Unos and Duos. It didn’t help. I tried to pray. It didn’t help. I went to see outdoor concerts at Grant Park and Ravinia. It didn’t help. I still loved baseball and deep dish pizza and writing music of many kinds, but the hole was still there. And though I felt so utterly empty, there seemed to be something inside the hole—pain. It was a duality of pain, one which sliced through the core of my emotional being to my depths and one which kept my physical stomach churning in endless ulceric gravitas.
As I searched relentlessly for pain-reducing remedies both with and without Christine, one night my mind flashed on something new to me then but with roots in my personal past. I remembered my night with Kathy Blazer, how goofy I must have acted, how I couldn’t remember so much of what I must have done, at least according to Kathy. I even recalled how good the rum and Coke had tasted that night in poor Robert Workman’s dorm room. I theorized that maybe one night Christine and I could go out to a little restaurant, order some rum and Coke with our pizza, have a bunch of giggles and laughs, and in the process I could find some relief from the pain of thinking of the deaths of my family with all the residual physical pain.
That afternoon I called Christine from work only moments after first conceiving my idea. She was at work but on break, so I didn’t have my usual difficult time reaching her. I asked her if she’d like to come to dinner with me that night.
She said yes immediately then continued, “What’s the occasion?”
I answered, “Absolutely nothing, except that I love you and feel like going out and having some fun.” There was nothing untrue about my statement.
“Where to?” she asked.
“PU,” I said, our fun initials to signify Pizzeria Uno.
And she said, “Okay, Turf, I’ll see you when I get home.”
I felt better already. I always did when I knew I was going out with Christine. Although she was not capable of filling the hole in my heart, nor should she ever have been expected to do so, she always was a wonderful companion and I loved her dearly.
That was my first experiment with rum and Coke. It was my second time drinking it. My initial use of them as a drink a few years earlier with Robert Workman had been an accident, but tonight I wanted to see if rum and Coke could help with emotional pain. By the time I ordered my drink, Christine had already ordered her customary water with lemon, which I usually drank, too. The difference between us was that she drank hers straight. She didn’t even squeeze her lemons into the water. She just plopped the lemons into the water and that’s the way she liked it. I would squeeze my lemons into the water, squeezing every drop I could out of the one or two wedges a server would usually bring to me. Then I’d add some substitute sugar to it, and bam, I’d have a glass of easily made lemonade.
“You’re having a rum and Coke, tonight? That’s different. I think that’s the first time you’ve ever ordered a drink at dinner since we’ve been together.”
“It is. I have a taste for it.”
“You do? I didn’t even know you drank.”
“I don’t.”
“How’d you know you had a taste for it?”
“Do you remember the night we met? You picked me up out of the snow. Earlier in the evening I stopped in the room of one of my lonely acquaintances and he gave me rum and Coke. I obviously drank way too much, but I remember having a fun night overall. I know I’ve been moody for a long time now, and I figured if I had one or two drinks that I might be more fun for you tonight and feel less tension inside.” Christine went right along with me.
“If you’re going to have a rum and Coke, I’m going to have one too.”
She was already smiling like a child.
“It’s pretty powerful stuff,” I told her. “You’d better limit yourself to one, so you can drive. I’ll limit myself to two. After all, I’m almost a foot taller than you, and I won’t even think about driving. Is that all right with you?”
“Of course it is,” she said, her blue eyes glistening in the dimly lit pizzeria.
We laughed through dinner. We mocked the Cubs who were having another mediocre season. We laughed about co-workers and their oddities. We giggled about whether Miss Kitty and Matt Dillon were having sex on Gunsmoke. We debated which was scarier, Outer Limits or Twilight Zone. And I actually felt better emotionally. I was high enough to be happy, to have fun with the young woman I loved more than any other person in the world. And Christine had fun, too. And from what I can now remember, it was the most I had seen Christine smile since before the crash.
By the end of the meal, Christine’s share of our large deep dish pizza had absorbed her singular rum and Coke, so I felt good about her driving us home. After a drunk driver killed my family, I was never going to drive drunk, or allow anyone, who I considered even remotely tipsy, to drive me anywhere. This I swore to the core of my twenty-four-year-old being. I would never drive drunk.
We went home that night and made love. We were still giggly from the various conversations we had had at the restaurant and on the way home. And Christine was more frisky because I was behaving more jovially than in the last six months.
That’s how my alcoholism started. Innocently enough. And with some marvelous side benefits. I always had my two rum and Cokes and she’d sometimes have one then drive us back to Bridgeport. There were restaurants in Bridgeport that we liked—an Italian joint, two Lithuanian spots, The Governor’s Table, and David’s—but whenever we went to a Bridgeport restaurant, we’d always walk. We’d hold hands, talk, and laugh, and I remember feeling excited even before getting to a restaurant because I knew that in a few minutes my rum and Coke would help anesthetize my still decimated emotions.
Five years into the restaurant drinking, I didn’t have a single negative thought about what I was doing. I had worked hard and earned my PhD, writing my dissertation on drunk drivers and the effects they had on their victims, their victim’s families, and their own families. Christine had helped me tremendously with my college tuition, and I was finally able to begin paying her back while saving some cash for our future family and our retirement, which seemed so eternally far away.
When I drank, always rum and Coke, I felt better emotionally. For the first couple of years, Christine accompanied me. I’d have two drinks, she’d have one, and then drive us home. That was our system. For some strange reason, I had a loyalty to rum and Coke. It was almost as if the drink was a friend to me. I had no desire to drink anything else or even try something different. But after two years into our restaurant drinking, Christine decided one night that rum and Coke, alcohol, was not her thing, and she stopped it, snap, just like that. With no problem. She had no dependency on liquor. She switched unceremoniously to lemonade and that became her drink for the next decade. There was also no judgmental negativity from her toward my drinking. After all, it was something I did only when we went out to dinner, which was on average, maybe seven or eight times a month. I didn’t look or act like an alcoholic in any fashion. We didn’t keep alcohol in the house. Through my twenty-ninth year of life, I had never purchased a bottle of rum. I acted like a perfectly well-adjusted man in every way. The fact that I had a couple of drinks a few times a month when we went out was never perceived by Christine or myself as a danger sign as to what alcohol might do to me in the future.
In what I perceived as fact at the time, alcohol seemed to be working for me. When I drank, I laughed and giggled in whatever restaurant we were dining. And Christine seemed to be enjoying me more when I was my extroverted self than the more introverted sober and somber self I had become since the accident. Our restaurant nights almost always culminated with us making love and falling asleep in a tender embrace. Those were some of my favorite nights with her. And they were some of my favorite times with myself. I hardly noticed the pain pit in my stomach on those wonderful rum and Coke nights.
The problem was that I was growing increasingly more dependent on alcohol to loosen me up, to relax me. I was consciously aware of this. But my body and subconscious were in those secret places within which truths are stored.